A variety of processes are performed in the fabrication of semiconductor devices. For example, deposition processes are performed in the fabrication of some semiconductor devices to form a layer or film of an oxide or other material. Deposition processes may be carried out on a batch of semiconductor wafers, as opposed to depositing the layers on wafers one at a time. The batch of wafers that are exposed to a particular deposition process may include production wafers, which are the wafers on which the semiconductor devices are formed, and may also include dummy wafers. The dummy wafers are sometimes included in a batch of wafers so that uniform deposition on the production wafers of oxides or other materials can be achieved, e.g., the dummy wafers may be included in order to provide a desired number of total wafers in the batch, for example, in a case where less than a full batch of production wafers are available for processing and the processing is sensitive to the number/load of wafers being processed. The dummy wafers are thus subjected to the same deposition of material as are the production wafers; however, the dummy wafers do not typically proceed to further processing steps in the production of the semiconductor devices. Rather, the dummy wafers are typically discarded after a certain number of uses, or after the dummy wafers have accumulated a certain thickness of the deposited material. Discarding dummy wafers increases the costs of producing the production wafers.